"A Motor That’s Also an Input Device (..) Because this is a “direct drive” system, there’s no gears to shear. Anyone who has busted a geared servo motor by stalling or back-driving it knows what I mean. IQ Position Modules don’t have this problem. When you stop driving the IQ module – put it in a “coast” mode – it turns freely and without resistance. This means the IQ motor doesn’t just “write” motion – it can “read” motion as well."

In short, I am in support of Naomi Wu. Rather than let the Internet speculate on why, I am sharing my perspectives on the situation preemptively.

As with most Internet controversies, it’s messy and emotional. I will try my best to outline the biases and issues I have observed. Of course, everyone has their perspective; you don’t have to agree with mine. And I suspect many of my core audience will dislike and disagree with this post. However, the beginning of healing starts with sharing and listening. I will share, and I respectfully request that readers read the entire content of this post before attacking any individual point out of context.

The key forces I see at play are:

Prototype Bias – how assumptions based on stereotypes influence the way we think and feel
Idol Effect – the tendency to assign exaggerated capabilities and inflated expectations upon celebrities
Power Asymmetry – those with more power have more influence, and should be held to a higher standard of accountability
Guanxi Bias – the tendency to give foreign faces more credibility than local faces in China

from his book: "the only similarity between gongkai practiceas and Western open source practices is that both allow you to download source code; the legal and cultural frameworks that enable such sharing couldn't be more different. It's like convergent evolution, where two species may exhibit similar traits, but the genes and ancestry are totally different.

But that does show one of the flaws of fact-based reasoning. Engineers love to make decisions based upon available data and high-confidence models of the future. But I think the real visionaries either don’t know enough, or they have the sheer conviction and courage to see past the facts, and cast a long-shot. It’s probably a bit of both. Taking risks also means there’s a bit of luck involved.

"I was on of the people who made "Shanzhai" products (..) Shanzhai is a spirit. Shanzhai is a spirit. It is the spirit of bottom and grass roots. The "Shanzhai" are the most creative, influental people in China."
"[in Silicon Valley there is a] small group of people, who are the venture capitalists (..) [they] control how technology will be developed, how technology will be applied, and how technology will be available to the general public - that is the very definition of control economy"
"Microsoft [under Gates] said open source is communism - now it is one of the supporters of open source"
"In China there is a general lack of awareness of the negative ramifications of gentrification - just as in the 60ies no one in New York thought that this was a bad thing. (..) My concern is that in this reinvention, it wants to very quickly get rid of its even immediate past."
"When the government designated Shenzhen as a Special Economic Zone, they left patches of land for the villagers themselves to build homes." "This is the boundary line between the city and the urban village."
"They innovated despite the government. They'll be there - they keep walking. They might have cut a path that might have looked interesting, and this path is now being paved into a road - they cut another path. You have never had a fox being run over by a steamroller."
"The militarization has benefited the big companies. If they back off (..) they're threatened by innovation. (..) They'll become so entrenched that they can't move on (..) and a very flexible ecosystem like China will just roll over them, and they'll wonder how that happened. It's because they did it to themselves at the end of the day."
[points at misaligned light switches] "Now you look at these light switches.. are they straight? (..) Detail!"

"Bunny: It's not that Silicon Valley got divorced from technology. They're very much about technology. They just kept moving up the stack.
And the key thing that drove that, in my opinion, was Moore's law. (..) And that's literally all that Moore's law has been: that's reducing the font size of circuits.
In the 70ies and 80ies [there were] many failed research attempts to build parallel computers. (..) It was by far cheaper to sit back and wait and let guys like Intel just move Moore's law ahead and buy the next fastest processor. And so what you found was: actually being in hardware wasn't profitable. And so what really sold products back in the day was features. (..) Computers got faster for free. (..) People now not had to worry about writing detailed stuff in C code. They could use high level languages, they were able to use web pages, and then JavaScript comes along. (..) [So] there was no value in soldering parts. (..) [Now, at the end of Moore's law] people are realizing there are niche markets for hardware. (..) Now they're coming back to this ecosystem [Shenszen]: Oh, you guys know how to solder?! We forgot about that. That's really good! Can you help us build these things?"